


In the Time of this Mortal Life

by OldShrewsburyian



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Angst, Angst and Feels, Arthur Conan Doyle Canon References, Book of Common Prayer, Canon Compliant, Church of England, Gen, Gen or Pre-Slash, Grief/Mourning, John Watson Loves Sherlock Holmes, John Watson Thinks Sherlock Holmes is Dead, Nice Mary Morstan, POV John Watson, Post-Reichenbach, Post-The Final Problem, Reichenbach Angst, Reichenbach Feels, Religious Content, Sherlock Holmes & John Watson Friendship, The Final Problem, Victorian, Victorian sentiment at its most sentimental honestly, Watson's Woes WAdvent, oh and did I mention?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-08 21:06:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12873021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OldShrewsburyian/pseuds/OldShrewsburyian
Summary: Would Holmes really have left Watson without any word for three years? If he had tried to give Watson a clue to his safety, how would he have done it, and would Watson have understood? Set in the winter of 1891.





	In the Time of this Mortal Life

_From the journals of Dr. John H. Watson_

I do not write these lines for publication. I write them because I need, for my sanity and perhaps for my salvation, to have the truth set down before me. In late April of 1891, in the full beauty of spring, I had departed London in the company of my friend Sherlock Holmes. Whatever his highest hope had been in that moment, mine had been to assure his safety from Moriarty and from that terrible web which Holmes saw so clearly, and which I only dimly divined. But I prevaricate even here; I must not. Holmes had told me very plainly of his hope and of his fear. Both were realized at the Reichenbach Falls. If I refused to understand the full extent of either before I was confronted with the final and most terrible evidence of his struggle and their death, it was not the fault of Sherlock Holmes. I returned to England with his cigarette case in my pocket, and a void in my life. 

To walk from my consulting rooms to our Baker Street digs and back again took an hour almost exactly. This I did daily. On the day that the English papers announced his death, I received a telegram from Mary. It said only: _Dearest John, am returning at once._ I met her on our doorstep. It seemed to take an age to wrangle her bags, though they were modest enough. Even so, when we were at length together in the hall, and alone, I found myself still choked and silent. My attention and my gaze were fixed on the linoleum, on the double scar left by a workman's boot. At last I said to Mary, “He sends you his greetings,” and broke down utterly. That was the beginning, I think, of realizing what it would mean to live without him.

Yet in that winter of 1891, the prospect of an existence without Sherlock Holmes filled me with undiminished dread. The six months’ period of mourning had expired. I had, of course, mourned Holmes publicly; but I could hardly continue to wear crape after his brother had ceased to do so. It would not have been seemly. So I went through the streets of London alone with my grief. No longer did eyes linger sympathetically on my armband, or flit with agonized awareness to meet mine. No longer did women smile, or men nod, in a way that seemed to acknowledge my sorrow and condole with me. I could have howled. I could have smashed windows. 

There was at least the distraction of the ’flu — and, God forgive me, that is what it seemed to me in the dark, foggy days of that November. The suffering of my fellow-creatures was to me scarcely more than routine and distraction and, in the exhaustion it brought at the end of each day, a blessed analgesic, dulling a pain that would neither cease nor lessen. 

I could not stop imagining those last moments at the falls. Holmes had taught me too well for me not to see them in my mind’s eye. The path was a soil ready to take impressions; it might have been chosen by Holmes himself as a teacher chooses a scientific specimen for examination by his duller pupils. That he had chosen such a scene for his death… I asked myself again and again what it meant. And I was forced — inevitably, inexorably — to the conclusion that Holmes had meant no less than he said when he swore that Moriarty’s death was one he would be perfectly willing to bring about through his own. It was the former of which he wished to be absolutely sure. If it meant making the other more likely… At this point, the logical thread of my rumination invariably broke down. It was a matter of anguish to me, that he could have made that calculus. I had memorized the lines in which he had, so earnestly and so anxiously, attempted to explain himself to me. _…I fear that it is at a cost which will give pain to my friends, and especially, my dear Watson, to you._ And then, less forgivably: _I have already explained to you, however… no possible conclusion could be more congenial…_

He should have consulted me. The romantic imagination concerning which he loved to tease me could have supplied a dozen, a hundred other conclusions. I could have presented him with a new version of his life every time he came to dinner. He could have been knighted by Her Majesty. He could have decided to breed dogs. He could have taken up a lectureship at Camford, and become adored — how could he not be adored? — by his students for his eccentricities and his brilliance alike. He could have devoted himself entirely to sketching in the Auvergne. He could have taken his ancestral estate in hand, and written little monographs on forestry and fishing. I allowed myself to imagine Holmes striding light-footed and loose-limbed in the wake of a gamekeeper, chatting about hen-pheasants.

I allowed myself to imagine, too — or is it that I could not keep myself from imagining? — other conclusions to those dreadful minutes on the edge of the abyss near Meiringen. Had I turned back sooner, had Holmes held Moriarty longer, or had the professor proved himself a less terrible assailant…. What right, I asked myself, had a stoop-shouldered, reptilian-eyed academic to overmatch my friend, my brilliant friend, who so delighted in the grace of his body, who so often had cause to call on its strength? I could have shot Moriarty: a killing shot, the execution he deserved at the hands of the public he had wronged, or a disabling shot, that he might live to face the public disgrace he merited. I could have snatched up Holmes’ alpenstock, and brought it down with all my force on the head that had planned so many crimes. I could have rushed onto that terrible path and pulled Moriarty off my friend by the collar, like a common street ruffian. If Holmes had survived — oh! if Holmes had only survived — if I had found him, however damaged, but _alive_ on that path, I would have done anything. I would have invented a surgical miracle, known ever after as the John Watson Procedure. I would have wept with gratitude. I would have carried him on my back to the village, even if he had jibed at me all the way, or even if I could not have been sure that he would survive the journey. I would not have doubted the goodness of a Deity who could countenance Holmes’ death.

When Mary became ill, I was at last pulled away even from these thoughts. My constant sorrow was occluded by my very urgent anxiety. Angrily, I fear, I dismissed my patients to the care of the already overburdened Anstruther. Good fellow, he saw what was in my eyes and uttered no word of reproach or of a sympathy which would have been insupportable. He offered only gentle professional encouragement, and the assurance that I could come to him at any hour if I found myself in need of supplies. So I got her well. It was a desperate enough business. But when she was to some degree convalescent, I could at least doze at her side, and console myself with the rhythm of her breathing. As she recovered, I think I began to recover too, though my illness had been of longer duration, and untreatable by any medicine known to science.

I have often had cause to remark that my friend Sherlock Holmes was bohemian of soul as well as habit. This is — or was, I should say — no less than truth. But if I had become, in some sort, one of his habits, he had likewise unbent so far as to acquiesce in some of mine. Advent services were one of these. Though I was by no means an orthodox observer of the sabbath, I cherished the familiar liturgies of the season, and their patient, hopeful expectancy that even the worst darkness would be lightened in the fullness of time. It was in these terms that I asked Holmes — almost impulsively, the first time — to come with me. He grumbled at me. I observed that he often described his own work as that of illuminating darkness. He pointed out, with that disconcertingly exact knowledge of his, that doing so would present us with a dilemma, as Baker Street marked the boundary line between two parishes, that of St. Mary and that of St. Cyprian. I maintained a preference for the former, while he, out of sheer mischief, I suspect, advocated for the latter. Holmes protested that the austere, intellectual bishop was a more appropriate patron to receive the honor of our idiosyncratic observances; the harmonies of St. Mary’s choir, however, were no less perfect than the harmonies of its Georgian facade, and so I carried the day.

“You should go, John,” said my own Mary. I started from the meditative stupor into which I had lapsed. “You should go,” she repeated gently. “You know you always love the service. And it seems only right, somehow, this year.” She ran a hand through my hair. “New beginnings,” said Mary, more softly still.

I leaned over the bed, and kissed her on the temple. “What did I ever do to deserve you?”

She was still, to my eyes, terribly pale, but she smiled up at me. “If I begin to answer _that_ , John Watson, you’ll be late, and the rector will scowl at you.” 

“Heaven forfend.” I bent, and kissed her small hands, until she affected to push me out of the door with them.

It was a long walk from our home to St. Mary’s, but I welcomed the touch of the wind on my face. The fresh air felt like a novelty, after my weeks in the sickroom. After the past months, it was a greater novelty still to walk among my fellows without wanting somehow to strike out, to break in upon their unbearable indifference to the fact that Sherlock Holmes was dead, and that the world was infinitely poorer for his loss.

When I was within a few paces of the church, I was briefly stopped by a small boy all but blundering into me. I would have suspected an attempt upon my wallet, but that he pressed something into my hand with clear intent. It appeared to be an edifying pamphlet on the virtues of St. Cyprian, on the cheap paper characteristic of such things. I gave it the merest glance, and might have looked no further, save for an underlining of the following sentences in pencil: _St. Cyprian retired to a safe place of hiding. His enemies continually reproached him with this. But to remain at Carthage was to court death, to cause greater danger to others._

Before reading further, I shouted. “Boy!” Something in my voice caused the crowds in the street to part before me, and the boy himself to stand arrested, though poised still for flight. As I limped towards the urchin, I reflected grimly that at least I had saved myself from crying out the name I longed to have once more on my lips.

“Boy,” I said again, more gently, and with a coin already in my hand, “who told you to give this to me?”

His left foot returned to join his right, flat on the pavement. “Portly gentleman, sir.” My heart sank. Yes: against all possible reason, I was still so susceptible to hope.

“A portly gentleman,” I muttered, echoing him.

“Yes, sir. With great sideburns.” He grinned, and sketched them for me with his hands against his own lean face.

I frowned slightly. “It’s Simpson, isn’t it?”

“That’s right, sir! Or Simpson Secundus, as Mr. ’olmes calls me, my brother Jim also being one of the crew.”

“Ah,” I said, and strangely it was not all bitterness, to recall Holmes’ absurd habit of giving Latin nicknames to his Irregulars. “That’s right, of course. Secundus.”

“We was very sorry to hear about Mr. ’olmes, sir, Jim and me.” 

“Yes,” I said, and found myself blinking away a stinging in my eyes. “Yes, it was a terrible thing. Thank you, Secundus.”

That was acknowledged with a shy little duck of the head. “But he won, though, sir, didn’t he?” said Simpson Secundus.

“What?”

“He won: he got all the gang locked away so’s they won’t trouble no one no more.” The boy’s face was irradiated with joy; it was an exultation all too well founded, I feared, on knowledge of what that gang’s liberty would have meant to the streets of London. “Jim and me threw things at ‘em.”

I was shocked into laughter, and astonished by it on my own lips. “Did you indeed? Well, there’s for that good deed, then.” And I fished a second coin out of my pocket, and ruffled his hair lightly. “Compliments of the season, Secundus.”

He grinned up at me, sketching a salute. “Same to you, doctor.” And he ran off without another word, vanishing again into a world without Sherlock Holmes. I returned my attentions to the little pamphlet. The biography of the severe saint himself I ignored; following it was an excerpt from one of his sermons.

_But for the rest, what else in the world than a battle against the devil is daily carried on, than a struggle against his darts and weapons in constant conflicts? The fact that, without any difference made between one and another, the righteous die as well as the unrighteous, is no reason for you to suppose that it is a common death for the good and evil alike._

I drew a shaken breath. The words responded to my own thought with such strange aptness that I was recalled in memory to the hearth of Baker Street, and my friend’s voice cutting across one of our shared silences. I did not look around. I knew I would not see him if I did. And yet my very skin seemed to thrill with consciousness of the man who would not be there. I rose in a daze to hear the great, rolling words of the first collect of the church year.

“Almighty God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armor of light, now in the time of this mortal life in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal; through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and for ever.”

I mumbled my amen with the rest of the congregation, and uttered, too, a silent prayer that grace might be offered, at that last great judgment, to a man who had been proud as the devil, yet had remained always on the side of the angels.

“Owe no man any thing,” said the first reader, “but to love one another: for he that loveth another hath fulfilled the law.”

Again I looked at the little pamphlet Secundus had given me. _St. Cyprian retired to a safe place of hiding…_ Oh, that it might be true! In that moment, I thought, I could wish with all my heart for it to be true. Let him be in hiding, even in the remotest corners of the world; let him suffer reproach, and I would defend him; let him even be apart from me, and I would forgive it all, if he were only alive, as full of obstinate self-justification as the saint. I might have crumpled up the paper, but I did not. I held it half-absently in my hand through the first part of the service, then transferred it to a pocket in order to exchange the peace with my neighbors. At the dismissal, I took it out again, folded it up, and secreted it like a talisman or relic, inside a cigarette case that was not my own.

**Author's Note:**

> The excerpts from the liturgy for the first Sunday of Advent are taken from the Book of Common Prayer: http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/1662/collects.pdf. St. Cyprian's sermon (here excerpted but not otherwise modified) was first delivered in response to an outbreak of plague: https://www.ewtn.com/library/SOURCES/MORTAL.TXT
> 
> Holmes' uncannily detailed knowledge of London is reflected in this parish map of 1877: http://mapco.net/parish/parish08.htm The two parishes in question are http://www.stmaryslondon.com/ and https://stcyprians.weebly.com/. My thanks to the C of E authorities responsible for dividing the parishes of 19th-century London; certainly they have long since passed to their eternal rewards (sundry), but without them this fic would not be what it is.
> 
> This story assumes that the Simpson in "The Adventure of the Crooked Man" is Jim (Simpson Primus.) The same story tells us of the scar on the Watsons' hall floor.


End file.
